October 30, 2012, ESB 1001

Airborne wind energy systems aim at converting the power of wind blowing up to 1000 m above the ground into electricity, by using tethered wings flying fast in crosswind conditions, i.e. roughly perpendicular to the wind flow. The automatic control of the wing is a key aspect of airborne wind energy. The control objective is to make the wing followfigure-eight paths while keeping a minimal safety distance from the round and avoiding aerodynamic stall. This problem involves nonlinear fast, time-varying unstable dynamics in the presence of  hard constraints. In this seminar, after briefly reviewing the main aspects of airborne wind energy, the research activities carried out in the last year at UCSB will be described, including the design and construction of a small-scale prototype, the development of dynamical models and of sensor fusion algorithms for the wing, finally the design and successful experimental testing of an automatic control algorithm. A short movie of the experimental tests is available at htp://lorenzofagiano.altervista.org/movies/EISG_UCSB_auto_wing.mp4.    

Lorenzo Fagiano received the MS degree in Automotive Engineering in 2004 and the Ph.D. in Information and System Engineering in 2009 from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. In 2005 he worked for Fiat Research Centre, Italy, in the field of active vehicle systems. In 2007 he spent a three-months visiting period in the Optimization for Engineering Center of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Lorenzo Fagiano is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, and a visiting researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His main research interests include airborne wind energy, model predictive control, stochastic systems, set membership identification. Lorenzo Fagiano is recipient of a IEEE Transactions on Systems Technology best paper award, of the ENI award "Debut in Research" prize 2010, of the Maffezzoni prize 2009 and of a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship.